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Kevin Swersky

23 accepted papers

2026

SWE-fficiency: Can Language Models Optimize Real-World Repositories on Real Workloads?

ICML 2026poster

Optimizing the performance of large-scale software repositories demands expertise in code reasoning and software engineering (SWE) to reduce runtime while preserving program correctness. However, most benchmarks emphasize what to fix rather than how to fix code. We introduce SWE-fficiency, a benchma…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

Directly Fine-Tuning Diffusion Models on Differentiable Rewards

ICLR 2024poster

We present Direct Reward Fine-Tuning (DRaFT), a simple and effective method for fine-tuning diffusion models to maximize differentiable reward functions, such as scores from human preference models. We first show that it is possible to backpropagate the reward function gradient through the full samp…

Cited by 135SourcePDFScholar
2023

CUF: Continuous Upsampling Filters

CVPR 2023poster

Neural fields have rapidly been adopted for representing 3D signals, but their application to more classical 2D image-processing has been relatively limited. In this paper, we consider one of the most important operations in image processing: upsampling. In deep learning, learnable upsampling layers…

Cited by 11SourcePDFScholar
2022

Data-Driven Offline Optimization for Architecting Hardware Accelerators

ICLR 2022poster

To attain higher efficiency, the industry has gradually reformed towards application-specific hardware accelerators. While such a paradigm shift is already starting to show promising results, designers need to spend considerable manual effort and perform large number of time-consuming simulations to…

2021

No MCMC for me: Amortized sampling for fast and stable training of energy-based models

ICLR 2021poster

Energy-Based Models (EBMs) present a flexible and appealing way to represent uncertainty. Despite recent advances, training EBMs on high-dimensional data remains a challenging problem as the state-of-the-art approaches are costly, unstable, and require considerable tuning and domain expertise to app…

2021

Oops I Took A Gradient: Scalable Sampling for Discrete Distributions

ICML 2021oral

We propose a general and scalable approximate sampling strategy for probabilistic models with discrete variables. Our approach uses gradients of the likelihood function with respect to its discrete inputs to propose updates in a Metropolis-Hastings sampler. We show empirically that this approach out…

2020

An Imitation Learning Approach for Cache Replacement

ICML 2020poster

Program execution speed critically depends on increasing cache hits, as cache hits are orders of magnitude faster than misses. To increase cache hits, we focus on the problem of cache replacement: choosing which cache line to evict upon inserting a new line. This is challenging because it requires p…

2020

Big Self-Supervised Models are Strong Semi-Supervised Learners

NeurIPS 2020poster

One paradigm for learning from few labeled examples while making best use of a large amount of unlabeled data is unsupervised pretraining followed by supervised fine-tuning. Although this paradigm uses unlabeled data in a task-agnostic way, in contrast to common approaches to semi-supervised learnin…

2020

LEARNING EXECUTION THROUGH NEURAL CODE FUSION

ICLR 2020poster

As the performance of computer systems stagnates due to the end of Moore’s Law, there is a need for new models that can understand and optimize the execution of general purpose code. While there is a growing body of work on using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn static representations of source…

Cited by 37SourceScholar
2020

Meta-Dataset: A Dataset of Datasets for Learning to Learn from Few Examples

ICLR 2020poster

Few-shot classification refers to learning a classifier for new classes given only a few examples. While a plethora of models have emerged to tackle it, we find the procedure and datasets that are used to assess their progress lacking. To address this limitation, we propose Meta-Dataset: a new bench…

Cited by 788SourcecodeScholar
2020

Neural Execution Engines: Learning to Execute Subroutines

NeurIPS 2020poster

A significant effort has been made to train neural networks that replicate algorithmic reasoning, but they often fail to learn the abstract concepts underlying these algorithms. This is evidenced by their inability to generalize to data distributions that are outside of their restricted training set…

2020

Optimizing Long-term Social Welfare in Recommender Systems: A Constrained Matching Approach

ICML 2020poster

Most recommender systems (RS) research assumes that a user’s utility can be maximized independently of the utility of the other agents (e.g., other users, content providers). In realistic settings, this is often not true – the dynamics of an RS ecosystem couple the long-term utility of all agents. I…

Cited by 74SourcePDFScholar
2020

Your classifier is secretly an energy based model and you should treat it like one

ICLR 2020talk

We propose to reinterpret a standard discriminative classifier of p(y|x) as an energy based model for the joint distribution p(x, y). In this setting, the standard class probabilities can be easily computed as well as unnormalized values of p(x) and p(x|y). Within this framework, standard discrimina…

Cited by 674SourcecodeScholar
2019

Flexibly Fair Representation Learning by Disentanglement

ICML 2019oral

We consider the problem of learning representations that achieve group and subgroup fairness with respect to multiple sensitive attributes. Taking inspiration from the disentangled representation learning literature, we propose an algorithm for learning compact representations of datasets that are u…

2018

Learning Hard Alignments with Variational Inference

ICASSP 2018accepted

There has recently been significant interest in hard attention models for tasks such as object recognition, visual captioning and speech recognition. Hard attention offers benefits over soft attention such as decreased computational cost, but training hard attention models can be difficult because o…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2018

Learning Memory Access Patterns

ICML 2018oral

The explosion in workload complexity and the recent slow-down in Moore’s law scaling call for new approaches towards efficient computing. Researchers are now beginning to use recent advances in machine learning in software optimizations; augmenting or replacing traditional heuristics and data struct…

Cited by 278SourcePDFScholar
2018

Meta-Learning for Semi-Supervised Few-Shot Classification

ICLR 2018poster

In few-shot classification, we are interested in learning algorithms that train a classifier from only a handful of labeled examples. Recent progress in few-shot classification has featured meta-learning, in which a parameterized model for a learning algorithm is defined and trained on episodes repr…

2015

Predicting Deep Zero-Shot Convolutional Neural Networks Using Textual Descriptions

ICCV 2015poster

One of the main challenges in Zero-Shot Learning of visual categories is gathering semantic attributes to accompany images. Recent work has shown that learning from textual descriptions, such as Wikipedia articles, avoids the problem of having to explicitly define these attributes. We present a new…

Cited by 527PDFScholar
2015

Scalable Bayesian Optimization Using Deep Neural Networks

ICML 2015poster

Bayesian optimization is an effective methodology for the global optimization of functions with expensive evaluations. It relies on querying a distribution over functions defined by a relatively cheap surrogate model. An accurate model for this distribution over functions is critical to the effectiv…

Cited by 1406SourcePDFScholar